H. P. BAXXTER: Chalk one up for Simon Busuttil

H. P. Baxxter has agreed to become a regular ‘columnist’ for this website. Here’s the first of what we hope will be many more.

I’ve just come back from the barber’s. It’s a little no-frills, no-appointment-needed place, next door to the local kazin tal-banda and sharing its clientele. Besides haircuts, it sells everything from toilet roll to postcards to plastic keychain versions of those Sicilian red horn amulets. The barber, name of Salvu, wears shorts and flip-flops, has bad breath and BO. But he is cheap and gets the job done.

“Is-soltu?” he asked. Is-soltu being a short back and sides.

His mate Pawlu, who’d just had a haircut himself, was flipping through today’s Times of Malta. There’s usually a copy for the clients’ perusal.

“Hanina rnexxielu jsibha, eh Pawlu! Minn daqs dawk miljuni! Irnexxielu jsibha!”

And they shared a hearty chuckle.

It was a brilliant few seconds. It’s the sort of honest-to-goodness humour that gets countries through the Blitz or fifty years of dictatorship.

Simon Busuttil’s meeting with Sai Mizzi has been a victory for him, and a giant face-palm for Sai Mizzi.

Her whereabouts had been the big national joke and tracing her was mission impossible, but Simon Busuttil pulled it off. Whichever way the Prime Minister’s sycophants and army of communication coordinators try to spin it, this is the way it’s being read.

Simon Busuttil has finally expressed what many of us have been thinking in secret, keeping quiet lest Labour’s Thought Police single us out: “She is not up to it.” Hear, hear.

The report’s pithiness is simply delicious: “Ms Mizzi-Liang protested strongly when he raised the salary issue and she could not understand what the fuss is about her being the Energy Minister’s wife.”

Sai Mizzi has come across as a petulant, spoilt woman, who gets flustered at the smallest question and who cannot answer a simple request for information, never mind face up to scrutiny.

She has also come across as something worse. As Foreign. She is not One Of Us. She said so herself. Not in so many words, but in her tone of voice and attitude. “We” are the Maltese. “We” be haters. “You” haters gonna hate. She is “something else” and will show us scum what’s she worth: “See what I do for you.”

I have just committed lèse-majesté with the aggravating factor of suggested racism here. But as Joseph Muscat might say, woddi hack.

Busuttil summed it all up in his parting comment: “If this was a job interview, she would have failed it.”

Outstanding.

Simon Busuttil is one up, and about bloody time too. For, as Alastair Sim tells us, he who is not one up is one down.

Busuttil wins 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.

Hard cheese, Sai Mizzi Liang.

P.S. No use looking it up in the English dictionary. You wouldn’t understand the reference. It’s a foreign thing.